Speaker (Jason M. Lemkin) argues that for their (business SaaS) application the main failure risk would be lack of market demand rather than inability to build the product. Early company efforts were explicitly oriented to mitigate market risk (finding/validating a market) rather than product risk (engineering/technology). The app is described as substantial but technically straightforward.
If we end up going down and crashing burning flames and this doesn't work, it will be not because we couldn't build the application. We weren't inventing new video codecs or driverless cars or anything like that. It was roughly simple business SaaS app. It was big, but it wasn't particularly hard. And so we said, it's like, okay, well, if this doesn't work, which we need to figure out really soon, if it's not going to work, it'll be because there's no market that will be the primary cause of failure. And we'd rather know that now. So then everything was in the early years were kind of oriented around that thesis, which is we need to mitigate market risk and not product risk.
